True story.... Years ago my poor pregnant wife woke up to the smell of smoke to find me burning model scrolls in the living room. :) I was burning them to observe damage patterns and practice reconstructing fragmentary scrolls.
A new article reports how several scholars have gone and done that as a test case for virtually unwrapping carbonized scrolls like the Herculaneum papyri. They used modern papyrus with lead-laced ink, carbonized it, and then went through the process of scanning and virtually unwrapping it. Their conclusion that metallic additives in the ink make the scanning process more effective and easier is not particularly novel, since we have already observed that in other scrolls like the En-Gedi Leviticus scroll. The real challenge is reading and unrolling scrolls without metal additives. But it does sound like a fun experiment, and the authors hope that it can serve as a ground truth for benchmarking other studies and methods.
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